Growing up, I had a recurring nightmare where we were having lunch at my grandmother’s house. The wall came tumbling down and a roaring tiger came out from behind. Everyone went scrambling - my aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends who were there for lunch. My 8- year old self ran and hid behind a big black piano.
It didn’t look like exactly my grandparents' house, for one, we seemed to be eating on large picnic tables. I have a clear image of one of my aunts there, the rest of the people were hazy. The walls were made of carton too; it didn't keep anything back.
I would stay huddled behind that piano bench, scared that the tiger would eat me. It paced back and forth but it didn’t feel angry or hungry. My inner child was terrified, as you would be if a tiger suddenly appeared in front of you and you were stuck there.
After a few weeks of this recurring dream, one night I was watching the tiger and I suddenly realized that it was a dream. The tiger wasn’t there. But unfortunately, someone at school had told us that if you died in a dream you would then die in real life. So I hid from that tiger for years…
Decoding Dreams
Fast forward about 35 years and I asked a Jungian psychologist for recommendations on child psychology books. At the time, I wanted to enroll in a counseling masters but I wasn’t sure what style to adopt.
He recommended an author called Donald Kalsched and I read a book on dreams, nightmares and what they have to tell us. The ebook was super expensive so I got the Kindle in Portuguese 🇧🇷: O Mundo Interior Do Trauma (The Inner World of Trauma).
My Portuguese isn’t great but this is what I learned. The book is good, by the way:
- According to Kalsched, the elements in the recurring dream, or nightmare in my case, are parts of your psyche that are trying to protect you, while also revealing an unconscious complex. It's all you in the dream.
- He calls those complexes archetypal self-care systems (translating from Portuguese) and they have energy and personality in our dream state and unconscious. I imagine they influence our behavior while we are awake too, in knee-jerk reactions?
- We can revisit the dream to decode it; as far as I can tell, this is part of counseling sessions. My approach was to send healing to that part of me with Reiki and energy healing.
- If you die in a dream, you don’t die in real life. Obvious, but my inner child needed to hear that. Yesterday I started there and then sent healing to the part of me that went into hiding...
- I‘d already been connecting with Inanna, the goddess of music and war, after a meditation where Katy Perry’s Roar came up. I was trying to make friends with a tiger but my inner child was still terrified. In energy healing, that’s a fragmented part of your psyche that that has to be brought back into the fold, gently.
- A few weeks ago I realized that the tiger represents someone in my family - it’s a person and an energy that is powerful and that had the intention of standing up for me. That tiger energy was there for all of us.
- But as a child, and even more recently as an adult, big displays of emotion would throw me off. That energy was terrifying to me as a child, because of the emotion and the tiger image. My adult self isn't scared; I like the idea of a tiger spirit animal.
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